Quote by Fatima Mernissi: “To dream is to be dangerous in a world that fears imagination.”

In societies where authority demands conformity and obedience, the act of imagining something different — a freer life, a fairer world — becomes an act of resistance. Those in power fear dreamers because dreams are the beginning of change. Having an imagination is its own kind of defiance.

Mernissi published Dreams of Trespass in 1994, a period when political Islam was rising in influence across North Africa and debates about women's freedoms were intensifying in countries like Algeria, which was in the grip of a brutal civil conflict between the government and Islamist militants.

Moroccan feminist sociologist and author whose work examined Islamic societies, gender, and power with scholarly rigour and personal candour. Her 1994 memoir Dreams of Trespass explored the harem as a metaphor for all systems of confinement, and her writing continues to influence feminist thought across the Arab world.